I don’t claim to be a social networking expert, but as someone who has spent quite a bit of time thinking about end-to-end user experience and how companies can best use social services like Twitter to their best advantage, I decided to see how two of the biggest names in blogging use Twitter to support their brand identity.
WordPress/Automattic
I’ve been a WordPress user ever since Six Apart (who I’ll talk about a bit later) introduced paid licensing plans for Movable Type a few years ago. Since then I’ve gone back and forth between the systems usually at a rate of about once per year just to compare the feature sets, ease of use, and overall reliability of the two services. I suppose you could say I prefer WordPress for blogging because I keep coming back to it; however, there have been some very real improvements with Movable Type 4.2, so much so that I’m seriously considering either switching this blog to MT 4.2, or using MovableType exclusively for any new blogs that I start from here on out.
I like WordPress because their documentation runs rings around Six Apart’s, and because the community of folks who use WordPress are very committed, very helpful, and willing to lend a hand whenever you find yourself in a jam. When I published a post detailing my unfavorable experience moving this blog from the self-hosted WordPress product, to WordPress.com (and back again), Lloyd Budd sent me a public reply on Twitter offering help if I ever ran into any problems again. I was impressed at that kind of service, and it’s the little over-and-above customer service interactions that breed customer loyalty.
Movable Type/Six Apart
When it comes to brand recognition and visibility, I don’t think any other blogging system comes close to touching Six Apart and Movable Type (in my completely unfounded, unresearched, and inexpert opinion). Bolstered by having prolific and high-profile bloggers on their management team, Six Apart’s greatest success is the potential audience they can attract by virtue of the popularity of these bloggers.
When it comes to ease of use, however, Movable Type has a long way to go toward renewing any feelings of ill will I harbored toward them because of the licensing program and because of some well-documented problems I had when moving from WordPress to the open beta of Movable Type 4. They weren’t terribly responsive at the time I had the problem (although a close friend and MT evangelist I know was), but since then, SixApart popped up in my Twitter response list more than a few times in the last two weeks whenever I had questions about MovableType 4.
The Battle of the Twits
I’ve been following SixApart for about a month or so now, and since then I’ve been really impressed with how they use Twitter to talk about Movable Type. They pack much more in 140 characters than many other companies can pack into a one-page press release. Taking a look at some of their recent tweets, you can see that they run the gamut from talking about newly introduced features, to offering links to longer pieces that detail how bloggers big and small use Movable Type to publish their content. Here’s an example of the most recent tweets Six Apart published:
When I look at these tweets I see a company that is committed to engaging with users (or prospective users) in a personal and approachable fashion, and a company that is passionate not just about their platform, but about blogging in general. It’s very attractive, and it speaks very well of the amount of thought Six Apart put into using Twitter to their best advantage.
So how is WordPress doing in comparison? I admit that it might not be the most fair comparison since I only just started following them today, but I took the opportunity to page back through some fo their tweets to see if those on the front page were a representative sample of how they used the service overall. Let’s have a look at some of their most recent posts:
From what you see here, it’s easy to see that WordPress has a thing or two to learn about marketing. While announcements of product updates might be useful to those in the developer community (and to some degree, for more advanced users), there’s nothing in these tweets that tell me why I should use WordPress, or that directs me to press releases or case studies about bloggers and organizations that use WordPress for publishing. They’re champs when it comes to brevity, but brevity isn’t always best when you’re using a resource like Twitter to support your company’s business goals.
Conclusions
In this age of whuffie and building social capital, no organization can overlook the importance of presenting a friendly and approachable face to it’s installed and potential customer base. While I prefer WordPress as a blogging platform, Six Apart is the champion when it comes to making the most out of its Twitter stream. WordPress and Automattic could learn a thing or two about crafting a unified face across all their online identities, and could stand to spend a little more time on that message instead of on creating joke videos that poke fun at the competition (and even in this instance, Six Apart comes out on top because they come across as having a sense of humor about the ribbing they took from Automattic!).
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